My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [1]
Presently some swarthy gravediggers and a soldier peeped in at the door.
The latter shouted angrily:
"Clear out now! Hurry up!"
The window was curtained by a dark shawl, which the wind inflated like a sail. I knew this because one day my father had taken me out in a sailing-boat, and without warning there had come a peal of thunder. He laughed, and holding me against his knees, cried, "It is nothing. Don't be frightened, Luke!"
Suddenly my mother threw herself heavily on the floor, but almost at once turned over on her back, dragging her hair in the dust; her impassive, white face had become livid, and showing her teeth like my father, she said in a terrible voice, "Close the door! . . . Alexis ... go away!"
Thrusting me on one side, grandmother rushed to the door crying:
"Friends! Don't be frightened; don't interfere, but go away, for the love of Christ. This is not cholera but childbirth. ... I beg of you to go, good people!"
I hid myself in a dark corner behind a box, and thence I saw how my mother writhed upon the floor, panting and gnashing her teeth; and grandmother, kneeling beside her, talked lovingly and hopefully.
"In the name of the Father and of the Son . . .! Be patient, Varusha! Holy Mother of God! . . . Our Defense ...!"
I was terrified. They crept about on the floor close to my father, touching him, groaning and shrieking, and he remained unmoved and actually smiling. This creeping about on the floor lasted a long time; several times my mother stood up, only to fall down again, and grandmother rolled in and out of the room like a large, black, soft ball. All of a sudden a child cried.
"Thank God!" said grandmother. "It is a boy!" And she lighted a candle.
I must have fallen asleep in the corner, for I remember nothing more.
The next impression which my memory retains is a deserted corner in a cemetery on a rainy day. I am standing by a slippery mound of sticky earth and 'looking into the pit wherein they have thrown the coffin of my father. At the bottom there is a quantity of water, and there are also frogs, two of which have even jumped on to the yellow lid of the coffin.
At the graveside were myself, grandmother, a drenched sexton, and two cross gravediggers with shovels.
We were all soaked with the warm rain which fell in fine drops like glass beads.
"Fill in the grave," commanded the sexton, moving away.
Grandmother began to cry, covering her face with a corner of the shawl which she wore for a head-covering. The gravediggers, bending nearly double, began to fling the lumps of earth on the coffin rapidly, striking the frogs, which were leaping against the sides of the pit, down to the bottom.
"Come along, Lenia," said grandmother, taking hold of my shoulder; but having no desire to depart, I wriggled out of her hands.
"What next, O Lord?" grumbled grandmother, partly to me, and partly to God, and she remained for some time silent, with her head drooping dejectedly.
The grave was filled in, yet still she stood there, till the gravediggers threw their shovels to the ground with a resounding clangor, and a breeze suddenly arose and died away, scattering the raindrops; then she took me by the hand and led me to a church some distance away, by a path which lay between a number of dark crosses.
"Why don't you cry?" she asked, as we came away from the burial-ground. "You ought to cry."
"I don't want to," was my reply.
"Well, if you don't want to, you need not," she said gently.
This greatly surprised me, because I seldom cried, and when I did it was more from anger than sorrow; moreover, my father used to laugh at my tears, while my mother would exclaim, "Don't you dare to cry!"
After this we rode in a droshky through a broad but squalid street, between rows of houses which were painted dark red.
As we went along, I asked grandmother, "Will those frogs ever be able to get out?"
"Never!" she answered. "God bless them!" I reflected that my father and my mother never spoke so often or so familiarly of God.
A few days later